SaaS Provider BlueTie Selects Nimble Flash Storage Arrays

BlueTie Inc., a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, supports thousands of businesses and millions of users with its cloud-based e-mail, calendaring, and collaboration solutions and application suite.

As BlueTie’s business expanded to support nearly one million users, the SaaS provider evaluated and selected Adaptive Flash storage arrays from Nimble Storage, Inc. As a result, the SaaS provider realized a reduction in data center footprint, increased application performance, and obtained an immediate ROI.

Prior to deploying Nimble, BlueTie relied on aging legacy storage that kept its IT organization busy managing various components across its data center, resulting in operational complexity and inefficiency that increased costs and stifled IT productivity. It became increasingly apparent that BlueTie needed to either upgrade its existing environment or switch to a different storage platform.

BlueTie decided it was time to evaluate new technologies gaining momentum in the storage market with the following goals for its IT infrastructure: reduce the company’s data center footprint; optimize performance for its email platform supporting nearly one million users; scale storage capacity to support expansion space; and keep a couple of pennies in its pocket for a rainy day.

After evaluating a number of storage vendors, BlueTie determined the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform was the only solution that could meet the four criteria.

Following a transition to the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform, the company has realized gains in application performance, storage capacity, as well as a reduction in its overall data center footprint.

According to Robert Doty, president and CEO, BlueTie: “We are now hosting over 800,000 mailboxes on our Nimble storage, and are nowhere near the performance ceiling of that array. We like the way the Nimble CASL file system ‘sequentializes’ random writes into large sequential stripes. We knew that model would be a good fit for us, since our data is so random. Nimble had the perfect solution for our needs.“

The company experienced a reduction in processing power required to operate its production environment because the storage subsystem performance increased. The reduced system load has enabled BlueTie to operate its mail service using far fewer servers – a reduction of 33U to just 10U – with a reduction of its storage footprint from 3-1/2 racks to 12U of Nimble. As a result of the footprint reduction, it is saving more than $36,000 in power costs on an annualized basis. Nimble also provided 1.3X compression on all of BlueTie’s data, allowing the organization to remove its previous software compression functionality, freeing up an additional 16TB of storage.

Since deploying Nimble, BlueTie has slashed its IT support costs.
“We were paying $70,000 per year for support on our old platform which we were able to eliminate entirely by switching to Nimble,” said Doty. “When you add that savings to our $36,000 cut in electricity costs each year, the Nimble array will easily pay for itself in just a few years. Everything is running very smoothly on Nimble, in contrast to the myriad problems we were having with our legacy provider. Nimble designed and built the arrays specifically for the needs of our organization. I really appreciate that.“